Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Shuffle an array of n elements

Suppose to have a uniform random generator in [0, 1)

Monday, July 22, 2013

Bing vs Google suggestions





Spot the difference on {royal baby} - which on has better suggestions the unbranded search engine or the other one?

Friday, July 19, 2013

What they've said about new Knowledge Suggestions @ Bing

"This is one area where Bing has a clearly better user experience than Google, if you’re looking to get actionable results from the actual search box. While Google will put a Pitbull Google+ profile in its autosuggest feature, it does little with suggestions for any of the examples Bing provides"

That’s not to say Google’s Knowledge Graph results don’t provide ways for users to distinguish what they’re looking for, but you have to get through the search query before you can tell Google what you’re actually looking for (like the Harry Potter books vs. movies, for example). Of course, you could always specify in your actual query."

Bing Autosuggest Expands to Take on Instant Search, Knowledge Graph In One Fell Swoop http://t.co/nPS4Z6qufz
Bing has taken search suggestions, autocomplete, and semantic search to a whole new level. -- http://t.co/nPS4Z6qufz




searchenginewatch.com
Bing initially provided info directly in the search box for a celebrity, politician, athlete or a connection on LinkedIn with a public profile. This has now expanded to include brands, 


I find the experience pretty darn pleasant. Controversial article but our share is increasing. http://t.co/8SryXw61Eb via @MarketingPilgrm


marketingpilgrim.com
Bing is still out there, folks. Interestingly enough every time I use the engine (which is usually only because I have been urged to do so d


PCMag talks about the new searchbox with Knowledge understanding -http://t.co/pTf0J2xpk6


pcmag.com
Bing's People Autosuggest today got a boost, expanding category options to include brands, movies, albums, places, software, sports teams, animal species, and more.


Techcrunch talks about Bing Autosuggest - http://t.co/0DgvxFq8OU


techcrunch.com
Microsoft's Bing today announced an update to its autosuggest feature that expands the number of categories that will trigger this feature. In May, Bing first introduced this tool for celebrities, politicians, athletes and publicly available LinkedIn profiles. Today, it is adding bran

According to webpronews we clearly beats Google - http://t.co/v5HIA9jE1Q


webpronews.com
Bing announced today that it is now including more types of entities in its autosuggest feature, including brands, movies, albums, places, software, sports teams, and …


Searchengineland talks about the searchbox disruption - http://t.co/vLbOjnoKSs


searchengineland.com
Bing announced they have expanded their search autosuggestions to add more than seven new categories. Bing added autosuggest completions for brands, movies, albums, places, software, sport teams, animal species and more. This is in addition to Bing adding people, 


Microsoft is pushing a bit further by surfacing these differences directly below the search box. -- http://t.co/LcQRmNU7BR


thenextweb.com
Microsoft today announced it is expanding its Bing's People Autosuggest feature to include more than just humans. In fact, the search engine will now automatically suggest brands, movies, ...


Help vague Bing users get off of Microsoft's landing page and on with their lives.http://t.co/FeC6kax9EJ via @engadget


engt.co
Having a hard time finding something on the internet? You're probably doing it wrong -- at least that seems to be Microsoft's supposition. The company



Other articles:

Bing Autosuggest Categories Revamped
UberGizmo (blog)

Microsoft expands Bing’s autosuggest for people to include animals, brands, movies, albums, places, and more
thenextweb.com 


Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Disrupting the searchbox

Today,
I published a blog on Microsoft search and it has been quoted by many

This is one area where Bing has a clearly better user experience than Google, if you’re looking to get actionable results from the actual search box. While Google will put a Pitbull Google+ profile in its autosuggest feature, it does little with suggestions for any of the examples Bing provides.
That’s not to say Google’s Knowledge Graph results don’t provide ways for users to distinguish what they’re looking for, but you have to get through the search query before you can tell Google what you’re actually looking for (like the Harry Potter books vs. movies, for example). Of course, you could always specify in your actual query.”




Sunday, July 14, 2013

SQL-like engines on the top of hadoop map/reduce

I missed to notice that there are new engines, in addition to standard hive and pig.

  • stinger is an optimized compiler aiming at introducing almost real time computations in hive
  • Impala is another real-time sql engine released by Cloudera
  • Drill is yet another real-time sql engine

Apache Kafka

A nice system for distributed logging from multiple platform - apache kafka

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Monday, July 8, 2013

Othello

Othello is a game played on a square board, with black and white pieces. If a white/black piece is surrounded by a  black/white one (either left/right or up/down) then the piece will change color. Players play in turn until they have valid moves left. Implement Othello following Object Oriented criteria (e.g. what is a piece, what is a board, what is a game, who keeps the score, what is a valid move).

represent a double in [0,1) as binary

First need to understand what is the binary representation for a double in [0,1). Let's see an analogy.  If the number is an integer such as 123 I would probably make something like this

2 ^ 7  = 128 > 123 too large
123 - 2 ^ 6 = 59 -> set bit 1
59 - 2 ^ 5 = 27 -> set bit 1
27 - 2 ^ 4 = 11 -> set bit 1
11 - 2 ^ 3 = 3 -> set bit 1
3 - 2 ^ 2 < 0 -> set bit 0
3 - 2 ^ 1 = 1 -> set bit 1

1 1 1 1 0 1 1  

SearchCharm - Unified Search Experience in Windows 8.1

I am using windows 8.1 preview since many weeks without any problem. Search experience brings together the online and the offline worlds and it allows users to look for information virtually everywhere.

Traditional Web Search
Do I want to access cnn? Easy. I start to insert the query and I get both the web site and some relevant suggestions including cnn news and cnn money. Suggestions are generated by my group in London.




Navigating windows 
Do I want to access windows control panel? No problem, I just use the same interface and search paradigm.



Cloud search
What if I want to access my files stored in the cloud? Here I have my cv saved on Microsoft Skydrive and accessing it is as easy as searching via the charm





Local search
What if I want to access my files stored in my local computer? Here I have some videos saved on my local computer and accessing them is as easy as searching via the charm





Sunday, July 7, 2013

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Search as you type with snapshots and disambiguation

Exciting day today! Bing is shipping an innovative search feature aiming at helping users to complete their tasks, as soon as they start to type their queries.

Consider the keyword "pitbull". This is a very interesting query because the user can be interested in getting either results about the famous singer (a person) or about the dog (an animal). For this example, we believe no instantaneous decision can be taken on the user's behalf and that only the user has a complete understanding of the intent expressed with a query.

However, we believe that the search engine can help the user to express very quickly this intent. How? In Bing we use the power of Satori (our Microsoft Knowledge Graph) to enrich our suggestions with additional information useful for disambiguating different meanings associated with the query. In this way, the users can select their own most appropriate choice.
















Another example is the query {pluto}.  Is the user interested in the planet or is she interested in the cartoon? Those are very different kinds of entities which happens to have the same name but Bing understands the difference and gives to the user the opportunity to select the desired choice.
















Now let's suppose that the intent is not ambiguous. For instance consider the keyword {michele obama}, we believe that it is very valuable to have a rich suggestion like the following one.
















And what if there are two persons with the same name? In this case, we offer the opportunity to select the desired person as in this example for the query prefix {rachel nich}
















One more example. Let's consider the query {u2}. Here, we offer the opportunity to explore all the entities / artists that are playing with the pop band




And what if you search for {harry potter}? In this case Bing provides a snapshot of the filmography, a reference to the book and a reference to the character.






















Hope you enjoy it - this is the beginning.